Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offerings with the general availability of Windows Azure Media Services, which lets enterprises skip building their own infrastructure for streaming on-demand video. The service, released Tuesday, can be used to deliver training videos to employees; stream video content from a website; or build video-on-demand service similar to Hulu or Netflix.

Like many cloud-based platform-as-a-service offerings, Windows Azure Media Services aims to make it easier, in this case, to roll out video streaming services. With Windows Azure Media Services, enterprises can stream video to laptops, tablets, smartphones, game consoles and TVs based on, for example, Windows, iOS and Android. Developers can build workflows for automatically uploading, encoding and delivering video using REST APIs or .Net and Java SDKs, which can be downloaded from the Azure developer website. At that website, developers can also find documentation to help them get started.